America's Baby Bust

The nation's falling fertility rate is the root cause of many of our problems. And it's only getting worse.

Americans are not reproducing enough, and the long-term consequences are dire, says Jonathan V. Last, author of "What To Expect When No One's Expecting," in a discussion with WSJ Weekend Review editor Gary Rosen.

By

Jonathan V. Last

Updated Feb. 12, 2013 4:31 p.m. ET

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For more than three decades, Chinese women have been subjected to their country's brutal one-child policy. Those who try to have more children have been subjected to fines and forced abortions. Their houses have been razed and their husbands fired from their jobs. As a result, Chinese women have a fertility rate of 1.54. Here in America, white, college-educated women—a good proxy for the middle class—have a fertility rate of 1.6. America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.

Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.

The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America's total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn't been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.

The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.

ENLARGE

97% of the world's population now lives in countries where the fertility rate is falling.
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For two generations we've been lectured about the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First, global population growth is slowing to a halt and will begin to shrink within 60 years. Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation. Think about it: Since 1970, commodity prices have continued to fall and America's environment has become much cleaner and more sustainable—even though our population has increased by more than 50%. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the most precious resource.

Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

There has been a great deal of political talk in recent years about whether America, once regarded as the shining city on a hill, is in decline. But decline isn't about whether Democrats or Republicans hold power; it isn't about political ideology at all. At its most basic, it's about the sustainability of human capital. Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney took the oath of office last month, we would still be declining in the most important sense—demographically. It is what drives everything else.

If our fertility rate were higher—say 2.5, or even 2.2—many of our problems would be a lot more manageable. But our fertility rate isn't going up any time soon. In fact, it's probably heading lower. Much lower.

America's fertility rate began falling almost as soon as the nation was founded. In 1800, the average white American woman had seven children. (The first reliable data on black fertility begin in the 1850s.) Since then, our fertility rate has floated consistently downward, with only one major moment of increase—the baby boom. In 1940, America's fertility rate was already skirting the replacement level, but after the war it jumped and remained elevated for a generation. Then, beginning in 1970, it began to sink like a stone.

There's a constellation of reasons for this decline: Middle-class wages began a long period of stagnation. College became a universal experience for most Americans, which not only pushed people into marrying later but made having children more expensive. Women began attending college in equal (and then greater) numbers than men. More important, women began branching out into careers beyond teaching and nursing. And the combination of the birth-control pill and the rise of cohabitation broke the iron triangle linking sex, marriage and childbearing.

This is only a partial list, and many of these developments are clearly positive. But even a social development that represents a net good can carry a serious cost.

By 1973, the U.S. was below the replacement rate, as was nearly every other Western country. Since then, the phenomenon of fertility collapse has spread around the globe: 97% of the world's population now lives in countries where the fertility rate is falling.

If you want to see what happens to a country once it hurls itself off the demographic cliff, look at Japan, with a fertility rate of 1.3. In the 1980s, everyone assumed the Japanese were on a path to owning the world. But the country's robust economic facade concealed a crumbling demographic structure.

The Japanese fertility rate began dipping beneath the replacement rate in 1960 for a number of complicated reasons (including a postwar push by the West to lower Japan's fertility rate, the soaring cost of having children and an overall decline in the marriage rate). By the 1980s, it was already clear that the country would eventually undergo a population contraction. In 1984, demographer Naohiro Ogawa warned that, "Owing to a decrease in the growth rate of the labor force…Japan's economy is likely to slow down." He predicted annual growth rates of 1% or even 0% in the first quarter of the 2000s.

From 1950 to 1973, Japan's total-factor productivity—a good measure of economic dynamism—increased by an average of 5.4% per year. From 1990 to 2006, it increased by just 0.63% per year. Since 1991, Japan's rate of GDP growth has exceeded 2.5% in only four years; its annual rate of growth has averaged 1.03%.

Because of its dismal fertility rate, Japan's population peaked in 2008; it has already shrunk by a million since then. Last year, for the first time, the Japanese bought more adult diapers than diapers for babies, and more than half the country was categorized as "depopulated marginal land." At the current fertility rate, by 2100 Japan's population will be less than half what it is now.

Can we keep the U.S. from becoming Japan? We have some advantages that the Japanese lack, beginning with a welcoming attitude toward immigration and robust religious faith, both of which buoy fertility. But in the long run, the answer is, probably not.

Conservatives like to think that if we could just provide the right tax incentives for childbearing, then Americans might go back to having children the way they did 40 years ago. Liberals like to think that if we would just be more like France—offer state-run day care and other programs so women wouldn't have to choose between working and motherhood—it would solve the problem. But the evidence suggests that neither path offers more than marginal gains. France, for example, hasn't been able to stay at the replacement rate, even with all its day-care spending.

Which leaves us with outsourcing our fertility. We've received a massive influx of immigrants from south of the border since the late 1970s. Immigration has kept America from careening over the demographic cliff. Today, there are roughly 38 million people in the U.S. who were born elsewhere. (Two-thirds of them are here legally.) To put that in perspective, consider that just four million babies are born annually in the U.S.

If you strip these immigrants—and their relatively high fertility rates—from our population profile, America suddenly looks an awful lot like continental Europe, which has a fertility rate of 1.5., if not quite as demographically terminal as Japan.

Relying on immigration to prop up our fertility rate also presents several problems, the most important of which is that it's unlikely to last. Historically, countries with fertility rates below replacement level start to face their own labor shortages, and they send fewer people abroad. In Latin America, the rates of fertility decline are even more extreme than in the U.S. Many countries in South America are already below replacement level, and they send very few immigrants our way. And every other country in Central and South America is on a steep dive toward the replacement line.

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That is what's happened in Mexico. In 1970, the Mexican fertility rate was 6.72. Today, it's just at replacement, a drop of 72% in 40 years. Mexico used to send us several hundred thousand immigrants a year. For the last three years, there has been a net immigration of zero. Some of this decrease is probably related to the recent recession, but much of it is likely the result of a structural shift.

As for the Hispanic immigrants who are already here, we can't count on their demographic help forever. They've been doing the heavy lifting for a long time: While the nation as a whole has a fertility rate of 1.93, the Hispanic-American fertility rate is 2.35. But recent data from the Pew Center suggest that the fertility rate for Hispanic immigrants is falling at an incredible rate. To take just one example, in the three years between 2007 and 2010, the birthrate for Mexican-born Americans dropped by an astonishing 23%.

In the face of this decline, the only thing that will preserve America's place in the world is if all Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Hispanics, blacks, whites, Jews, Christians and atheists—decide to have more babies.

The problem is that, while making babies is fun, raising them isn't. A raft of research shows that if you take two people who are identical in every way except for childbearing status, the parent will be on average about six percentage points less likely to be "very happy" than the nonparent. (That's just for one child. Knock off two more points for each additional bundle of joy.)

But then, parenting has probably never been a barrel of laughs. There have been lots of changes in American life over the last 40 years that have nudged our fertility rate downward. High on the list is the idea that "happiness" is the lodestar of a life well-lived. If we're going to reverse this decline, we'll need to reintroduce into American culture the notion that human flourishing ranges wider and deeper than calculations of mere happiness.

We'll need smart pronatalist policies, too. The government cannot persuade Americans to have children they do not want, but it can help them to have the children they do want. Here are three starting points:

Social Security. In the U.S., the Social Security system has taken on most of the burden for caring for elderly adults, a duty that traditionally fell to grown-up children. A perverse effect of putting government in the business of eldercare has been to reduce the incentives to have children in the first place. One RAND study suggested that Social Security depresses the American fertility rate by as much as 0.5.

Looking to dismantle this roadblock, some analysts have suggested flattening the tax code to just two brackets and significantly raising the child tax credit. Others suggest exempting parents from payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare while they are raising children—perhaps by a third for their first child, two-thirds for the second, and then completely for a third child. (Once the children turn 18, the parents would go back to paying their full share.)

Regardless of the particulars, the underlying theory is the same: To reduce the tax burden for people who take on the costs of creating new taxpayers (otherwise known as children).

College. Higher education dampens fertility in all sorts of ways. It delays marriage, incurs debt, increases the opportunity costs of childbearing and significantly increases the expense of raising a child. If you doubt that the economics of the university system are broken, consider this: Since 1960, the real cost of goods in nearly every other sector of American life has dropped. Meanwhile, the real cost of college has increased by more than 1,000%.

If college were another industry, everyone would be campaigning for reform. Instead, politicians are trying to push every kid in America into the current exorbitantly expensive system. How could we get college costs under control? For one, we could begin to eliminate college's role as a credentialing machine by allowing employers to give their own tests to prospective workers. Alternately, we could encourage the university system to be more responsive to market forces by creating a no-frills, federal degree-granting body that awards certificates to students who pass exams in a given subject.

The Dirt Gap. A big factor in family formation is the cost of land: It determines not just housing expenses but also the costs of transportation, entertainment, baby sitting, school and pretty much everything else. And while intensely urban areas—Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago—have the highest concentrations of jobs, they come with high land costs. Improving the highway system and boosting opportunities for telecommuting would go a long way in helping families to live in lower-cost areas.

These ideas are just a start; other measures certainly will be needed to avert a demographic disaster in the U.S. If we want to continue leading the world, we simply must figure out a way to have more babies.

—Mr. Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and author of "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: American's Coming Demographic Disaster" (Encounter), from which this essay is adapted.

Corrections & Amplifications The U.S. replacement total fertility rate was higher than 2.1 children per woman in the 1800s and early 1900s due to childhood mortality. A chart that ran with an earlier version of this article incorrectly showed the replacement rate as constant since 1800.

I've read that people who have children aren't as happy. This isn't true. Can't be. I had 7 and loved every minute of it. Oh sure, we shopped at only the most exclusive garage sales, drove 5 year old vans, and built large utilitarian homes with 3-6 bathrooms, but it lasted so briefly and now they are all gone with many children of their own. The flashlights work, the car has gas every time, there's milk; the house is clean; and I'm bored. What a riot it was...

So nobody thinks it's getting crowded on this planet and maybe it would be GOOD to have a declining population for a while? Everything that used to be fun is a drag now because of traffic, parking and waiting in line. I've had trouble finding a quiet, uncrowded space to enjoy nature lately.

"If robust religious faith" and fertility over individual happiness is emphasized, are we not then going to regress back into antiquated, medieval, oppressive and unenlightened barbarianism, where the woman is viewed as a baby-making sex doll and a single tome of hateful, extremist rhetoric (espousing great injustices such as the slaughtering of homosexuals and the suppression of women) is held to be the one absolute truth?

I do not believe that the gauge, scope, and measure of the human condition should rest on its fertility rate. The problems this article has cited regarding the decrease in fertility--an insustainable economy and lack of innovation, are social problems (contingent upon the problems of our system of capitalism) which should be dealt in and of themselves and not through a lens of fertility rate.

So, mankind (as presented by the WSJ) can take the place of God as being the supreme social engineer . . . as though it is only natural for contemporary social engineering to adhere to the same principles embraced by the fractional reserve system . . . which is currently in a state of terminal flux under the guidance of the progressive mindset.

Other than immigrants, the group in the US with the highest number of children per family is the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nicknamed "Mormons". There are six million Mormons in the US (out of 14 million worldwide), and Mormon couples tend to get married earlier and to have perhaps twice as many children, on average, as other Americans. My three adult children and their spouses, ages 32 to 38, have 14 children among them. The number of Mormons has consistently doubled every 20 years for over a century, about half of that growth from children raised in the faith, but the other half from conversions of people from other faith traditions. Assuming this century long trend continues, Mormons in the US could reach 12 million in 2030, 25 million in 2050, 50 million in 2070, and 100 million in 2090. If currently fertility rates continue for the rest of the population, it seems possible that by 2100, there will be 150 million Mormons just in the US, and half of all children in the US will be born in Mormon families. Since Mormons tend to be healthier, longer lived, more law abiding, more charitable with both their time and money, more productive as workers, more educated (including being overrepresented in academia and the sciences), and with greater life experience with foreign cultures and languages, they could well be the major positive force in the long term US demographic picture.

"the parent will be on average about six percentage points less likely to be 'very happy' than the nonparent. (That's just for one child. Knock off two more points for each additional bundle of joy.)" I don't believe this statement. I have 4 kids. I would not be happy without them. That said, I see how a study might skew data to conclude nonparents are happier. Nonparents get to focus on a self-interested lifestyle. Parents, at least those who parent well, give up 10-20 years of self-interest to focus on the child's development, not to mention the budget impact of raising and educating each child. I spend hours watching my kids, playing, participating; hours that if left to myself, I would enjoy and could afford to do other, more-personally-entertaining things. That doesn't mean that I don't get my own personal time, but I'm lucky to get a few hours per week to myself, and that is usually only for a workout (which really only makes me happy at the end of it when it stops). Altogether, I don't see how my choice to have and to parent my kids makes me "unhappier." More tired, sometimes more frustrated sure, but also extremely happy at small joys that my kids make possible every day.

"If our fertility rate were higher—say 2.5, or even 2.2—many of our problems would be a lot more manageable. But our fertility rate isn't going up any time soon. In fact, it's probably heading lower. Much lower."

Thank you John, that's just a pyramid scheme that simply didn't last. It is true that our policies have always been short sighted and relied on permanent population growth. Any growth like that leads to overpopulation, and a war over resources, such as WW2.

After world war 2 we were growing as a population to make up for all the death and destruction and our economic models made sense. It's also when America grew, and so did the rest of the world. We replenished society naturally. But creating artificial population growth, especially through amnesty will not accomplish that. That'll just make existing problems worse.

Time for our government policy to change, can't run a pyramid scheme forever.

Well, that's what happens when there are too many people and too few resources. Overpopulation, Chinese did their one child policy because there is a billion of them.

Children are hard to raise in this economy, women work, grand parents are usually too far away to help. So families opt out of having children. 1 month of maternity leave doesn't provide enough time to raise a child where dual income is required.

"Fertility rate" is very high amongst welfare families who are paid to have children though. That should tell you everything about this. It's the economy stupid.

According to your theory, China with its one child policy (fertility closer to 1.5) should have been experiencing a depression these last 40 years. I just don't buy the premise. Smaller numbers of children can be compensated for by developing higher quality children. The impact on the environment is not mentioned as a benefit of a shrinking population.

Where is your head buried? The graph dips in the 70's, right about the time Roe v. Wade went into effect! So 40 years later, there are 55 million fewer citizens. I cannot believe you did not mention abortion as a leading factor in contributing to "lower fertility rates". Because women were given "the right to choose" and there were no consequences (well, no apparent ones) in getting pregnant, they "chose" to abort their child. I think the missing 55 million people would have made at least a dent in your "decline theory". Shame on you for burying your head on this!

" the parent will be on average about six percentage points less likely to be "very happy" than the nonparent. (That's just for one child. Knock off two more points for each additional bundle of joy.)"

How depressing, given I want to have four children! According to this article, I will be a depressed bundle of sorrow :( my mother had four children and says it was the best decision of her life, but maybe she was one of the lucky ones who dodged being a statistic.

This phenomena is a very good argument in favor of more lenient immigration policies. We need to maintain the consumption capacity of our population for economic reasons as well as for social reasons that I could elaborate upon but will hold that for another time.

I believe the concern in the article was that the WHITE, college educated women's birthrate or fertility rate was declining. Not so with immigrants who are not white. Although that also declines after one generation.

Many school districts in the U.S. would be laying off teachers and closing schools were it not for immigration, illegal and legal. These children are our future productive citizens in virtually all aspects of the economy and society as a whole.

I know several families who have 5, 6, 7 and 8 children, and others who have at least 3 or 4. These fathers and mothers are intelligent and well-educated and live in the expensive suburbs of N. Virginia. The father works and the mother is at home with the kids, often home-schooling them. The children go on to good secondary schools and colleges, are well-behaved and out-going. These families have their struggles--and some fathers have had extensive periods of unemployment. They don't all have high paying jobs, but they manage and they don't appear unhappy. Why can they do this while other's complain that they can't?

I know almost no women under 50 who have more than two children. I know many women under 50 who have no children. No surprise about a declining American birth rate. What I do find surprising about this article is that it sees (eventual) population decline or stability everywhere and not just among white Americans and Europeans and the Japanese. I would like to see more evidence of this global change. I remember reading somewhere that soon (whatever that means) there would be more Vietnamese than ethnic Russians.

Our society is show short sighted and lazy that we are just going to not have babies, get fat and pay for our medical bills by borrowing from china. I'm thinking about going to the moon to start a new colony. Who's with me?!

In all seriousness, its bizarre that it's so politically taboo to not mention abortion in that article. They quote several stats about the decline in birth rate since 1973. What happened in 73? Roe v wade. 50 million potential tax payers, idea makers and parent care givers aren't here right now. Forget the moral aspects. I just wish they would discuss the practical aspects of abortion.

It seems like the lead essay in Saturday/Sunday Review, about 50% of the time, is about how the US and society, especially the middle and upper middle class, is in an inevitable state of DECLINE and we'd all just better get used to it. Then the rest of the Journal feeds the yen of the wealthy for the latest fashion, car, travel and geegaw you can flaunt and consume...more, more, more. What's the Murdoch message here for those of us who are literate and not rich (or trying to get a foothold back to where we once were)? Apres moi, le deluge? A boot in the face, forever? Only the elites matter and the rest of us better get used to being serfs? Inquiring and free minds want to know what the real agenda is here.

. It would be very easy to increase the birth rate and, not coincidentally, decrease the abortion rate.

Merely offer a small sum of money to every citizen who bears a child. Every week increase that small sum until the sum is large enough to induce a higher birth rate.

It is really that easy.

This an action would be described as a Socially Positive Stimulus. It would be an economic stimulus because the money would go to growing families and would therefore quickly enter the economy and boost demand. It is socially positive because it is tightly targeted at a social ill.

This should be attractive to conservatives because a large side effect would be a drop in abortion rates as those unexpectedly impregnated will choose the money over the abortion.

There is no way to tell what sum would induce a higher birth rate. But, if it took a $30,000 inducement to raise the number of births from 4 million to 6 million, the annual cost would be 180 billion dollars. This is about 5% of the budget and around 1 or 2 percent of GDP.

However, because that money would be spent and quickly raise demand for all the things needed to raise a child, there would be both a high multiplier and increased tax receipts, so the real cost would be much lower.

When the world's financial resources are reduced by $21 to $32 trillion, there is NOT enough money in circulation for the non-elite to be able to afford to have children, so let the elite worry about the baby bust problem they caused:

A global super-rich elite had $21 to $32 trillion hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study. The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined. The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by J. Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, for the Tax Justice Network. Mr. Henry said that the super-rich move money around the globe through an "industrious bevy of professional enablers in private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries. "The lost tax revenues implied by our estimates is huge. It is large enough to make a significant difference to the finances of many countries. His study deals only with financial wealth deposited in bank and investment accounts, and not other assets such as property and yachts. Mr. Henry estimates that since the 1970s, the richest citizens of these 139 countries had amassed $7.3tn to $9.3tn of "unrecorded offshore wealth" by 2010. Other findings in Mr. Henry's report include: 1) At the end of 2010, the 50 leading private banks alone collectively managed more than $12.1tn in cross-border invested assets for private clients; 2) The three private banks handling the most assets offshore are UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs; 3) Less than 100,000 people worldwide own about $9.8tn of the wealth held offshore. Source: Tax Havens: Super-Rich Hiding at Least $21 Trillion , July 22, 2012.

Well, I can definitely vouch for economics playing a large role in why my husband and I chose not to have children. And for those extolling the virtues of the extended family to care for children, it's a nice dream, but not really feasible. In order for my husband and I to have family close by to take care of the children we might have had, we would have had to stay in the economically depressed small rural town where both our families live. Or commute 60+ miles one way. The choice was to stay near family and struggle to find work, or move farther away and be gainfully employed. And we both work for small nonprofit organizations- we didn't forsake having a family so we can have fancy cars, elaborate vacations and the like. We haven't been on a vacation since our honeymoon eight years ago, and we recently gave up my car so I could use public transportation instead. We would lose our house if one of our incomes was decreased at the same time that our expenses due to caring for another person increased. We chose to better the world with the work that we do, rather than producing some children whose effect on the world is frankly a crapshoot. I would like to think our kids would be brilliant innovators, curing cancer and creating technology that makes our lives better, but there's an equal chance that they wouldn't have any effect at all or positively a negative one. The risks far outweighed the positives in so many different ways.

There is a problem. It should be solved. But the problem is incentives. Social Security takes away much of the benefit for career professionals to have children because the nanny state will care for us in our old age. Why pay for something twice? On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, our welfare programs clearly encourage having too many babies, both by giving larger payments to mothers who have them and by covering the costs of raising and educating them.

A real solution would fix the incentive problems: Family and local charity should replace government care for the elderly. Welfare should be replaced with private charity, where givers feel good about giving and receivers fell the warmth of human compassion (rather than the current system where both parties feel bad). Last, all education should be private. A side benefit to all of this would be a tremendous improvement in our federal and state government finances.

Wow! All this angst over having kids, not having kids, the economy, hidden assets....jeesh! Give it a rest! With some exceptions, most people have children because they want them - for whatever reason. Spending time with my children has been the most meaningful thing in my life. Seeing them get married and have their own children is wonderful too. I don't scorn childless couples or individuals. Clearly, if the white U.S. population continues having fewer children, it will become even more ethnically diverse than it already is, as business, government, and society relax immigration rules to allow more of those "huddled masses yearning to breathe free". Chris Cooke, San Diego

They can have a negative impact on "ME" time: partying, working out, hanging with friends, sleeping around, bar hopping, shopping, etc... Kids can impact career advancement. They cost money to keep around. And according to some they are even a threat to the sustainability of the planet.

Since Americans seem to be focused on pleasing self, children have become a stigma. Unless you are same sex couple. Then having an adopted child is a badge of honor... at least until the novelty wears off.

Having more than one child, has become a social "crime".

One solution is simply kill the children before they are born. If they manage to survive until after birth, many have pushed for the government to become their primary provider. After all the government can employ child care experts to look after these unwanted nuisances. "Parents" have become nothing more than biological donors that help to bring the child into existence.

Of course there was a time in this nation when children were considered a blessing, a gift from God. Dad and Mom found joy in watching their little ones grow and reach new milestones. Fulfillment, hope, and peace came from shared sacrifice and share achievement. Love meant laying down your life for one another and not simply a 30 minute encounter to feed the all consuming lust for self-gratification.

When I was growing up, my family lived in a working class town, the schools were good, and there were people ranging from dirt poor to relatively well off that all lived there and sent their children to the public schools. Most places were like this, and you had a few towns that were wealthy and had better than average schools and a few towns that had all poor people and terrible schools, but it wasn't hard to find a reasonable place to raise your children that was affordable for the working class.

I now have 2 children who will be attending school in a few years, and there simply isn't anyplace like that in which to raise them. You either pay for an overpriced house in an overpriced town to take advantage of the good schools, or you live in the ghetto, full stop. It isn't selfish not to have kids if you can't afford them. It is selfish to have kids and then subject them to substandard living and education because your need to procreate outstrips your ability to provide for them.

It's not the lack of children being born, it's the lack of white children being born. All the so-called advanced countries are experiencing a lack of white births in relation to non-white births. There, I said it. Why can't the media discuss this obvious demographic tragedy? Even if it makes the politically correct cringe. Nothing less than the future of modern civilization depends upon a solution to this extinction threat..

If welfare spending on the elderly were curtailed, would couples then decide to have more children so they could take care of them when they got old?

From previous readings, the number of children couples had began to go down as people moved to the cities and away from farming/ranching. Couples had children to help with the farm/ranch, but once people became more urbanized, the necessity of children became less, it was more of whether the desire to have them was there. So, I don't know whether any incentive could be created to cause people to want to have children, unless it was to get the people back to the land, being a farmer/rancher.

There seems to be so many children needing good homes, so instead of saying that couples that are intentionally childless are selfish, I like to say couples would want children but have their own instead of adopting, are selfish.

We are childless, and I can say that so far I have never had a regret that we didn't have children. The first rememberance I can recall (way before I ever got married) as to why I didn't want children, is that I didn't like the way the society I would have to raise them in was headed (that was back in the early 70s, where threat of nuclear was real); society has not changed in any way that has made me change my mind any, therefore no regrets.

If the economy was better and people could count on it (reduced threats of layoffs, secure futures etc) then maybe couples would be more comfortable having more children (or maybe they would just travel more since they have no farm to take care of). It is sort of like the chicken and the egg: do you you try to engineer society to increase the number of children so the economy would improve, or do you improve the economy so people would be more at east in having more children. I'm against social engineering ...

I wish I could have more kids! I love being a mom. We scrimp and save in order to be able to afford the one child that we do, but the expenses keep adding up. For example, my husband and I were determined to try to feed him naturally (i.e. without formula), which is theoretically cheaper, since it's free. But my son wasn't able to latch, and we spent over $1000 on specialist visits, lactation consultants, and the like before we found out that had we gotten it pre-approved, we could have had insurance cover part of the expense. Of course, between finger feeding, going to those specialist visits, and changing diapers, we barely had time to shower, had only a few hours to sleep, and didn't bother calling the insurance company until it was too late. (We figure we broke even, since formula would have cost over $1000).

Also, with the economy the way it is, we could lose our job randomly without much notice, so we're always trying to keep enough in savings in order to keep us afloat should that happen. Given that should we lose our jobs, without extra savings, we'd put ourselves at risk of not having sufficient health insurance, etc. we definitely cannot afford to have another child. I'd say that this is true of most of my friends.

The author points out a correlation between lower birth rates and economic growth, but I'd challenge him to find a better causal relationship. It may be that low economic growth causes lower birth rates and that subsequent low growth is a tertiary effect. Invest more in innovation, get growth going, and maybe we can turn this nasty pattern around.

What's worse than the lack of replacement leve birth rates are that the groups with the highest birth rates are the groups that contribute the least to the tax base and are less likely to raise children that will contribute to the tax base. That's just a nice way of saying that we are evolving into an idiocracy that won't end well in the long run, and many people don't feel particularly compelled to place an innocent child into such an awful and poorly run society as ours, where ones primary obligation as a citizen is to be a consumer; not a Citizen; not a Member; not an invested party... just a buyer of goods... and bads.

This is not a problem and doesn't need any kind of government intervention. It will correct itself if it ever becomes necessary to do so. Arguing that we need more people for economic reasons is down right sick as the author clearly thinks that people are nothing more than chattel to support the state which, like a greedy child, always thinks more is better.

Instead of arguing that people should be having more kids to support the leviathan welfare/warfare state, how about shrinking the state down to better meet the needs of the population the state is supposed to be benefiting?

You, as a hands-on, committed parent of four and myself - thinking about "being there", often since day one after they were born, starting with getting up to them at night, diaper changes, all the way to advance calculus help in college - as equally engaged parent of SIX,

we know all too well that those (precious, fast flying) 20 or so years we have our kids 24/7 is the BEST investment of our time, energy, resources and whatever abilities we as human being have and can share and pass on.

While my oldest ones, in upper 30s, both accomplished professionals and now great spouses and parents can't lend me their kids for "quality time with Opa" as their are at the other Coast, I have been blessed with having four more and being their primary care, at-home parent to boot.

I often say that our kids are our "best projects" and that any kind of professional or career satisfaction can't in the end compare. I know it "all", glamorous experience in Washington, DC, frequently "on the Hill", at the White House, dignitaries, power brokers, and then Wall Street brokers, talking to TV cameras. etc.

State dinners and fine dinners, socializing and "great" or memorable conversations with people whom we see at evening TV news, etc.

Travel and international travel.

But when I wake up in a morning, naturally as every parent "scan" and realize that all of my six kids and so far 4 grand kids so well, are healthy, kind, age-appropriate successful, my day can't start in any other way than on a rather upbeat, happy note and feeling of being blessed.

When I had an office on K St, 2 blocks of the White House, many college students and grads worked for us or interned, most of them women. They had BA/BS, them MS and even PhD degree, traveled, they were fit, knowledgeable, etc. most likely also potentially good parents.

Yet, they had a cat, made a "choice", tole their moms in OH or TX "sorry, no grand-kids" while being concerned about "endangered species", yellow frog in Amazon, etc. They wrote generous checks to National ZOO, so that panda bear has enough bamboo and will not have a miscarriage net time.

They were concerned about CONTINUITY of life of animal species while they cut off their own branch of family tree.

I am not at all religious person, so I do not have continuity of life by having children from any Book but as a refugee from communism, European immigrant in the US I am, every day, happy that we "erred" on a side of having "extra" children, almost 3-times more than the simple reproduction rate.

And - objectively measured - we see and have all reasons to believe that they and their kids (I am planning of 15 grand-kids:) will be part of the solution, not part of a problem that might arise in front of humankind in a future.

The Books are right when they say: "They were BLESSED with children."That's is also the only one known way how to get close enough to immortality:)

"Higher quality children"? Is that what one calls the little emperors dominating Chinese familial households? Incidentally, these little emperors - due to wholesale abortions of females - far outnumber little empresses. Which is a Big Problem.

And finally, the impact on the environment was mentioned in the article. As was the phenomena of less social innovation as the population ages and health care becomes a primary concern for the elderly - and a commensurate burden for the young.

Most cannot afford to have children because financial resources are scarce:

Cost to Raise a Child: Around $300,000, Not Including College, June 14, 2012, WSJ by P. Izzo: Middle-income parents who welcomed a new child last year can expect to spend nearly $300,000 over the next 17 years, according to a new report. The U.S. Department of Agriculture prepares an annual report about families’ expenditures on children for use in developing state child-support and foster-care guidelines. Annual child-rearing expense estimates ranged between $12,290 and $14,320 for a child in a two-child, married-couple family in the middle-income group, which is defined as a before-tax income between $59,410 and $102,870.

It is good to hear from you again. Thank you so very much for sharing these vital statistics with us.

Here in the USA, we suffer from a corrupt tax code that gives the rich far too many tax havens, favors, and special deductions that enable the elite to avoid reporting much income in AGI.

Not only has Congress allowed the elite numerous ways to avoid bearing a FICA tax responsibility comparable to the lower class and the middle class for supporting U.S. retirees, the numerous havens, deductions, and exemptions baked into our corrupt code enables them to avoid ordinary income taxes too.

These "favors" constructed by our Congress for America's elite, puts a tremendous burden on the non-elite to carry undue tax responsibility, and these "favors" are constructed so stealthily as to deceive the non-elite by concealing the truth because they prevent income from showing up in IRS-driven tax reports. These "favors" falsify the IRS-driven reports that the elite cite and that the media shares with the public in an appeal intended to allegedly justify the need to reduce an allegedly unfair tax burden born by the rich.

The bottom line is that the Congress that constructed and the rich who utilize this very corrupt tax code are lying to the public. They are using a corrupt tax code to advantage the rich and force the middle class to carry a very unfair relative burden.

It is good to read some real numbers resulting from real research on this topic. Thank you.

I think the affordable/decent towns still exist. We moved to central Mass. from Providence RI 19 years ago. The town was definitely not upscale but the community seemed ok. Fast forward to today and the school system, although not top notch, has put out some very good students. One of mine actually made it to an Ivy (sorry, couldn't help mentioning that) after graduating from the public high-school here.

The article itself states that Japan was the leader in showing the impact of a declining birth rate - this was clearly NOT due to a lower rate of "white births". And it also discusses how immigrant populations like Hispanics very quickly experience declining birh rates once they assimilate into US culture. In general, lower fertility rates tend to follow higher levels of education and income.

Your offensive argument uses racial issues to replace issues of class, and also makes no sense. Non-white workers also offer value to society and the eventually reality that there will be more of them than white workers (iin the US at least) is no tragedy.

To Mike Cochrane:You mention "secure futures." With more than 50% of the world's wealth stashed and hidden from shareholders, wives, and the tax collector (out of circulation), the masses that are forced to share the remainder most certainly cannot afford large families. Let those who own the stashed wealth handle the underpopulation problem:

Trillions Hidden in Offshore Accounts by L. Kilzer and A. Conte, July 8, 2012: Across Europe, experts say tax dodgers undermine economies in places such as Greece and Spain, threatening the Euro as a whole. More than half the world’s money passes almost undetected through a series of financial black holes that shelter it from not only the tax collector but from shareholders, partners and wives, a Tribune-Review investigation found. Once employed by gangsters such as Lansky and Luciano, these secret bank accounts have grown so vast and lawless that some experts fear the amount of money involved threatens societies from China to Africa, Europe and the U.S. World leaders railed against the impact of secret havens during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh three years ago. “They have caused a huge imbalance in the market,” said J. Christensen, director of London-based Tax Justice Network. “They are the very opposite of capitalism, which is supposed to be based on transparency. They are the shadow economy.” From Switzerland and a couple of Caribbean islands, the black holes are approx. 70 countries. Christensen said studies by several organizations, including the IMF, put the total stash at as much as $25 trillion. In contrast, the Commerce Department pegs the GNP of the U.S. at more than $15 trillion. Owners revealed by accident typically are corporations in other black holes halfway across the world. Tax losses to the U.S. amount to $1 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Research Service. That’s the amount congressional leaders tried to cut in last summer’s deficit showdown.

Let's think about this for a minute, Tom. It's simple math. No matter how big or small a population is relative to the amount of land, it's never a good thing for the population to be declining, 1.93, and not replenishing at the rate we're currently at-now or in the future- 2.2. Let's say we start declining at a rate of 1.5. When you go to retire there won't be enough people working (paying taxes) to support your social security you paid into. No babies ---> no workers -----> no taxpayers ------>no one to pay for you to sit on your duff when you're 65.

Reduce the size of government and eliminate regulations so there is no reason to hide the wealth. My mom grew up in the depression, her dad used to pick up pieces of cola along the railroad tracks so they could heat the house. Today, people on welfare in the U.S. take in the equivalent of a person making about $50,000, without lifting a finger, We need to get those people off welfare and into jobs where they are productive and contribute to society instead of being parasites. About 50% people pay no taxes, we need to get that number down, by a lot.

It's simple math only if you believe in taking advantage of those who can't defend themselves (in this case, future generations) Your argument for why we should be having more kids is because we need future suckers to support a ponzi scheme. That's pretty immoral in my book. Give me a better argument.

"...it's never a good thing for the population to be declining." - Give me a reason why rather than an unsupported statement. It's not like we are at extinction levels where I would grant you that there may be an issue that needs correcting. There are 7 billion of us in the world and 300 million in the US. Our population could drop by 10's of millions and we would be no worse off than we are now and, in some cases, we would be better off since there would be fewer people using the same amount of resources. Since most of that population decline is coming off of the back end (retired people), it could also be argued that the decline in that population also benefits the remaining population since retired people tend to consume capital without producing any corresponding capital which has the net effect of decreasing everyone's standard of living. This is even more true with the way social security is set up where 15% of every working person's efforts are being sent to retirees.

It is because I can do math that I don't plan on Social Security being around when I get around to retiring. I will have significant savings to live off of if Bernanke ever deigns to quit printing money and give me a decent rate of return for my risk in loaning money to others.

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